September — The Celebration of Harvest
There weren’t many times when the Hearth was bare, but the Celebration of Harvest was one of them. People were scattered around the city, busy with the preparations, only returning to the Great Hall to bring things for the feast. The Twins, who had far outgrown the need to be watched like children, were often left alone at this time, with only one or two Caretakers to attend to their immediate needs.
It was for this reason that Aifa found herself alone with the Twins the evening before the feast, at the time when day and night again found themselves shifting balance. The air was still sultry, rich with the humidity and fragrances of summer, the harvest season lingered, bringing with it a bounty of grain, apples, squashes and grapes, but the light had already shifted to that hard to describe but immediately recognizable golden mellowness that accompanies the turning of the leaves.
Aifa busied herself with archiving a series of messages the Twins had passed on to her during the previous week, and she didn’t hear when her name was called, in part because she was fully absorbed in her activity, and in part because she didn’t expect it. The Twins never spoke, not to her, anyway, this was something that she had always taken for granted.
A gentle hand touched her shoulder and made her jump to her feet.
“I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to startle you,” an even gentler voice spoke, almost in a whisper.
It was Ama. Jal was standing right behind her, smiling. Aifa didn’t know what to do, how to react, it was not every day that living deities decided to talk to one, especially at such a young age. She was so unnerved by this surreal circumstance that her whole body started buzzing with a strange vibration, not entirely pleasant, which she assumed had something to do with being too close to the divine.
“You saw us, didn’t you?” Jal asked, neither happy, nor upset.
Aifa’s first instinct was to hide, the second instinct was to tell them that she didn’t know what they were talking about, but something very deep inside her heart told her they already knew her every thought and passion, both good and bad, and loved her anyway. She nodded in agreement.
“Did we make you afraid?” Ama asked, her voice smothered with pain at the mere thought of that. “We didn’t mean to scare you, we didn’t think anybody would be awake so late at night.”
Aifa had a million questions to ask, but her upbringing had instilled in her too much reverence for the divine to make a two way conversation possible. One besought the spirit, one invoked the spirit, one didn’t expect the spirit to talk back.
“Go ahead. Ask,” Jal encouraged her.
“How?” was the only thing Aifa managed to ask, dry mouthed as she was with emotion.
“It’s very simple. We are the spirit of things, we are that which permeates all things, which flows through all things. Water is the symbol of the spirit. We are the spirit.” Ama and Jal giggled, talking together in a very weird polyphonic blend.
“Why don’t you look like that all the time? Do people know about this?” Aifa lost track of formality for a moment.
“It would be kind of difficult for people to interact with a couple of rivers, don’t you think? It’s hard enough for you to speak to us now, and we are just like you,” they replied in sync.
Aifa thought that no, they weren’t like her at all. She had never awakened from her sleep to find herself liquid, pooling peacefully in her own bed, and nobody worshiped her as divine, especially when her chores weren’t performed to the proper standards.
“We all come here to fulfill our purpose,” they said, a little sad. “You will still be here in spring, when we return.”
“But you won’t be the same,” Aifa burst into tears.
She didn’t know what it was, whether that call of the sea water in her blood was stronger than she thought, or the meaning of the Caretaker’s life had suddenly dawned on her, but she had become so attached to the Twins that her whole being ached at the thought of being apart from them.
“To you it will look like we are not the same, but we always are. We can never be anything else than what we are, we are the essence of the spirit, expressed in all its different forms. Look beyond the form, Aifa, and you will see that we never change.”
Aifa wondered why they had decided to approach her, and when she was all alone, no less. She wondered why nobody had prepared her for this, after all, it’s not something a person is just thrown into, unaware. What if she said something wrong? What if they decided that all that she was was not enough? On the other hand, what was the point of spending all of one’s time in the presence of the divine, if the divine never answered back. Sometimes Aifa thought the Twins’ demeanor so iconic that the fact that they were made of flesh and blood had become completely irrelevant. They might as well have been statues, for all the difference that made. But now, here they were, flanking her, staring at her intently but with kindness, until every fiber of her being was made keenly aware of the overwhelming presence of their will.
“What do I do now?” Aifa asked herself in a panic, because it stood to reason that divine judgment comes at the end of one’s life journey, not in the middle of it, and she couldn’t figure out how she was going to live from that day forward, now that she had felt the stream of all that was and all that will ever be brush across her forehead. What was she going to tell her grandmother, or her mother, who would even believe her? “What do I do now?”
“Live,” the Twins answered, in unison.
“But what should I do with my life?” Aifa managed to utter, almost against her will.
“Whatever makes you feel joy,” they giggled.
“My chores don’t make me feel joy,” Aifa thought, irreverently. “If they had chores, the Twins wouldn’t derive joy from them either. Where is the joy in scrubbing the floors?” she thought about the most recent activity she’d been engaged in, prior to this unexpected awakening of the spirit.
“You’ll figure it out,” they replied, pleased, half closing their eyes like cats when they are scratched under the chin.
They kept looking at her and the pressure of their gaze became so intense it was impossible for any human to withstand. Aifa squirmed, instinctively looking for shelter.
“Why do they keep staring at me like that? Surely there can’t be any corner of my being that hasn’t been fully evaluated yet. What could they possibly be looking for?”
And then, there it was: right there, in the ever growing tome in front of Aifa, the Twins finally found her love for them, scribed and folded with diligent fingers, so it wouldn’t get lost. Satisfied, they got up, resting their hands on her shoulders, and all her worries and struggles were carried away by their touch.
“Don’t forget us, Aifa,” they asked her, before they went back to the center of the room to resume the pose of living statues.
“I didn’t forget you,” was the first thought that came to her mind, in the past tense, just like the Twins’ message.
The day was winding down and the Caretakers started arriving from all corners of the city, and life resumed its mundane course, with familiar rhythms made even more jarring by their contrast with her strange spiritual experience.
‘What do I do now?’ the question popped into her head again, as her grandmother approached.
The latter had had a busy day and was not in the greatest of moods, so she kept to herself, like she usually did in these situations. Aifa was of course bursting with questions, but she felt it would be disrespectful to disturb her grandmother at the moment.
The latter continued working in silence. She thought Aifa had already left, because there were no sounds to betray her granddaughter’s presence, and upon lifting her eyes from her tasks she was really surprised to see her there.
“I didn’t realize you were still here. I’ll tell you, putting all of the pieces together for the Harvest Ceremony is like pulling teeth, but no matter, all gets done with will and time. How was your day?” she looked straight at Aifa.
The girl shuffled, uncomfortable, trying to find a way to ask her questions, which she assumed would be rather disturbing.
“What is it, child?” grandmother insisted.
“Doyenne, do the Twins ever talk? I don’t mean like little children, I mean like, you know, themselves.”
“As divine beings, you mean,” grandmother stared at her sharply. “Seldom, but it has been known to happen. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Aifa pushed her nose back into the tome and spent the following moments copying one of the messages, with a penmanship and attention to detail for which she would have expected praise under different circumstances. She continued her questioning. “Does anybody know what they said?”
“You know, there is a whole shelf in the archives, relating to the Twins’ prophecies, didn’t you learn that in school? I thought it was mandatory reading,” grandmother replied, still irked by her not so great day.
Aifa started to remember that class. It was very early in the morning, too, and the mumbling of the ancient words was so monotonous it took superhuman willpower not to fall asleep. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t remember a single word of it, and she promised herself to go to the archives as soon as the Feast of the Harvest was over, and read what other people had heard.
“Well, bear with me,” grandmother decided to indulge her anyway, “I don’t remember my studies all that well, it’s been a long time since I finished school, but I remember one of the prophecies said that the Twins had been birthed by the sea, and are inexorably drawn to it, they long for it their entire lives, but once they rejoin it, they can’t leave, and in order to return to us they have to be reborn.”
“That makes perfect sense,” Aifa couldn’t stifle a giggle. Grandmother gave her a stark, disapproving look.
“You know you have been given a great gift, right? Not to be taken lightly.”
“Yes, doyenne.”
“Being a Caretaker involves a lot more than attending to your chores. There is no end to the learning. Would you set that book aside for a second and help me go through tomorrow’s activities? I have reorganized these tasks so many times they are starting to run away from me.”
They spent the next half hour poring over the whos and whats and whens and wheres, until the spiky tasks laid down in proper order, tamed and well behaved.
“Why are we doing all of this, doyenne?” Aifa asked, still looking at the long list of chores on tomorrow’s to do list.
“Don’t underestimate the power of ritual, granddaughter. Everything you do every day changes the world in some small way. In ritual we honor our ability to shape life, by making our movements and words purposeful. The ritual is thus suffused by our will and carries it through to the divine in a respectful, loving manner. The difference between ritual and our daily activities is like the difference between music and noise. They both make sounds, but they are not equal in value. The most important part of our training as Caretakers is learning how to live gracefully.”
Aifa remembered what the Twins had said about what to do with life, and decided to ask her grandmother about it.
“Doyenne, what gives you joy?”
Grandmother looked at her, surprised. Of all the days for her granddaughter to ask this question, the girl had to pick this one, when the aforementioned sentiment was in such short supply. Sometimes she felt like the spirit liked to give unannounced tests, to see if its people were still paying attention. She didn’t want to leave the question unanswered, because not finding any reason for joy in one’s life, regardless of the specifics of the moment, didn’t seem like an acceptable thing to model to a child.
“I don’t know. Love?”
“That’s it? Just love?” Aifa smiled, curious.
“What else is there?” grandmother replied, absentminded, and went back to the list of activities for tomorrow.
